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The Settlers Online: Castle Empire

Information

Developer:

Ubisoft

Genres:

Strategy

Category:

MMO

Platforms:

The Settlers Online: Castle Empire is an advanced browser empire game in which players must micromanage their city as well as make greater plans to build new cities across the continent, while expanding their army to protect all the lands a player claims. Diplomacy, trading, warfare, and exploration all make up a browser game that is clearly developed by the same team that produces ‘The Settlers.’

Features

Build Your Own Empire: Players have complete management over their villages. If you want to specialize in fishing, mining, lumber collection, or luxury trade, it’s all up to you. Optimal placement is vital to maximize the efficiency of workers. Just make sure you keep enough housing for new residents to move in and enough money in the government coffers to pay maintenance!

Explore and Settle: The biggest goal in Castle Empire is to expand the empire of your castle. By sending out scouts and generals, you can clear bandit encampments and set up your own towns. Certain rare resources can be discovered through exploration to revolutionize your trade and army.

Extensive Trade System: Players can set up trade routes with other players to increase the power and number of resources available to each other. No longer is military the only reason you will interact with others in a strategy browser game. The players capable of managing their natural resources to produce the highest demanded goods will be guests of honor with all their friends!

Real-Time World Mechanics: Even when you are away from your empire, your settlers will continue to work and harvest goods, ensuring your empire grows and prospers in your absence.

Or at least, don’t join their US servers.
The game itself is the *worst* tamagotchi I’ve seen so far – search, building and other waiting times are set up such that in order to really use your resources efficiently, you basically gotta be online 24 hours. Mines collapse everytime they are being depleted and need to be searched for again, again and again – every day the same sisyphus task. Given that the fighting system just flat sucks, with the troops set up the way that you’re just bound to waste a maximum amount of them when you fight AI, this makes for a pretty frustrating and annoying gaming experience just from the game setup.

Given that there was no PvP when I was playing, this translated into lots of bored players in the global and trade chat rooms, and that turned toxic quite fast, since mods hardly online and players with too much unproductive energy to spend. Harassment, personal attacks and insults were so rampant on Ares that there were constantly forum threads dealing with the issue. And the interesting point is that it was actually the most senior players who created this kind of atmosphere and kept the “discussions” on that level, not the occasional trolls that were showing up too.
And given that the senior players are the ones who are spending the money, nothing was being done about it ever unless in one particular case – your reports to admins were just being ignored.

And should you ever have the bad idea of trying to point out these things in the chat rooms, you are immediately the new target, being harassed, viciously attacked and mocked upon. (Happened to me in the help chat when I tried to rein in a senior player who was openly trolling and insulting new players seeking advice.)

I don’t know about servers in other countries, they might be more civilized and respectful over there.
Third reason not to join: the game is still extremely buggy, servers crashing regularly, etc.

But besides there being better building games of the same genre available online, do NOT join the US servers – toxic atmosphere, harassments and constant bickering absolutely guaranteed. (Unless new PvP mode changed something about it, but I would not count on it.)
Very bad gaming experience, do not join this game.